Текст книги "The Coyote"

Автор книги: Michael McBride

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TWELVE

A serial killer is defined as someone who kills three or more people in a timeframe of greater than a month with a cooling-off period in between. Conservative estimates suggest there are between thirty-five and fifty serial killers at-large in the Unites States at any given time. Some theorize a more realistic estimate places that number between one hundred and one hundred and fifty. That’s roughly the same amount of American-born hockey players currently in the NHL. Who do you think you have a better chance of running into on the street?

I’ve worked a grand total of five cases involving serial killers. That’s almost one a year. The first was the kind that didn’t garner a whole lot of attention. Not at first, anyway. I was fresh out of Quantico and part of a task force composed almost exclusively of local law enforcement agents. My partner and I were essentially sent in to act as an FBI presence. You know, as a show of support. After all, we weren’t entirely convinced we were dealing with an actual serial killer. Considering the crimes had been committed right there in our own backyard, it seemed prudent to at least pretend we cared until we could either dismiss the situation or assume authority over it. At that point, we were only looking at two murders with similar, although not necessarily identical, MOs. Both involved dark haired women in their early thirties who had been strangled with some sort of ligature and dumped at construction sites in the northern part of downtown Denver, where gentrification was in full swing. It wasn’t until a third was discovered in the carcass of the Gates rubber factory that we knew for sure.

Fortunately, the victim hadn’t gone quietly. The killer had been identified using a tissue sample scraped from the back side of her right upper incisor, which brought us to the residence of a man named Lester Frye, who worked for the staffing agency that provided night security guards for the construction sites. As such, he’d been at the periphery of the investigation from the start, just close enough to realize when we were about to nail him. We found him with his big toe in the trigger guard of his shotgun and the bedroom ceiling of his apartment painted with blood and gray matter.

Our involvement might not have been what brought resolution to the case, but my preliminary, informal profile had been spot-on and my then-Assistant Special Agent in Charge Nielsen had rewarded me by getting me a small, largely observational role on the Boxcar Killer task force. By the time I was handed the assignment, five bodies had been discovered in freight cars along the main north-south railroad route from Wyoming through Colorado and all the way down into New Mexico. The only connection between the victims was the nature of their deaths: blunt impact to the base of the occipital bone with enough force to sever the spinal cord. Internal decapitation, they called it. No other physical or sexual violation, despite the fact that they’d all been discovered completely naked. My task had been to track the credit card activity of the victims both prior to and after their deaths. I had taken it a step further, though. I had isolated the final transactions of the victims on the established dates of their murders and utilized the various security cameras at nearby ATMs, street lights, and inside the stores themselves to establish what the victims had been wearing, the only thing the killer had taken from them in addition to their wallets. Three of those cameras—one each in Cheyenne, Fort Collins, and Pueblo—had also captured an image of the same man following them from a distance. Facial recognition software did the rest.

Andrew Stanton, a fifty-three year old railroad engineer who’d been out of work since the economy started to founder, had been downsized by the very freight line on which the bodies were discovered. We picked him up at the Burlington Rail Station in Casper, Wyoming, wearing a dress and makeup belonging to his most recent victim. Apparently, he’d been using whatever cash the victims had been carrying to purchase tickets, dressing in their clothing so no one would recognize him, and simply riding from one end of the line to the other and back again, essentially living on the trains since he knew no other life.

My ingenuity garnered me a larger role in the task force investigating the Drifter, a name I never really found fitting. To me, that moniker made him sound like a man who traveled the country, searching for the place where he belonged. I envisioned him as looking a lot like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause based solely on the name, which was a preconceived stereotype I had to fight against the entire time. In actuality, the Drifter was a rather plain looking man named Dennis Howard, who fashioned homemade rafts he could set adrift on the Mississippi River. He just strapped the bodies of his victims to the undersides of these floating heaps of junk and trusted the mighty river to eventually destroy them and bounce the corpses along the bottom, one of which ended up as far south as Natchez, Mississippi. Considering he lived and hunted in St. Louis, that was no small accomplishment. Lord only knew how many others were still tangled on the bottom or buried in the silt or washed up in any number of vast marshes.

Had his MO been to drown them, we might never have found him. Instead, he took his victims to an abandoned factory that used to process bone meal for pet foods, where he butchered them in an insulated dry storage room that had accumulated a layer of crusted blood on the floor so deep we couldn’t even find the bottom with a hammer and chisel. The victims had inhaled the lingering particulates, which forensics had been able to scrape from their sinuses, tracheas, and lungs. Since they were dead before submersion, they never breathed the water into all of those ordinarily air-filled recesses. Had he not kept their eyes, we might never have convicted him.

The fourth was the crown jewel on my resume, the feather in my professional cap. I had initially started investigating the case on a hunch. Five housewives had been reported missing from the southern suburbs of Denver over a six month span. Wives leaving their husbands wasn’t uncommon. Nor was leaving without taking any of their belongings with them. Women walked away from their lives and started from scratch with their lovers every day. None of the women had left behind children. A history of infidelity was essentially impossible to prove. And if the police tried to track down every wife who left her husband, they wouldn’t have any time left to give speeding tickets. What first caught my eye was that in each case the husband had filed the formal missing persons report immediately following the end of the twenty-four hour waiting period. All of the reports had been filed on Saturday evening, which meant that all of the women had left them late in the afternoon on a Friday. Records indicated that all five husbands had called the police and pretty much every emergency assistance agency and nearby hospital multiple times. In each case, the wife had left behind her car, everything she owned, including her purse, and a husband who, upon interview, failed to set off my facial BS detector. Each of the husbands, to a man, was convinced that his marriage was in excellent shape, there were no problems with fidelity, and he would be willing to do anything within his power to bring her back.

Without any proof of foul play, my only option was to talk to the neighbors, who pretty much corroborated what the husbands had said. One in particular, a busybody I was confident I’d caught about a half a bottle of wine into her evening, suggested that the woman across the street might have run off with the UPS man. She said she sure as hell would have. Apparently, he’d had some pretty muscular arms, over which she had drooled while he was leaving the house carrying a large box back to his truck. A call to the main UPS hub had confirmed that no delivery or pickup had been scheduled for that address, nor were they missing any trucks from their fleet. The man on the phone had chuckled about the muscular arms comment. It turned out that was a trait fairly common to men who delivered heavy packages for a living, believe it or not, but he did invite me down to interview the drivers who worked the southern routes. One of them, a ruggedly handsome guy named Rich Meyers, had proffered his hand and looked me in the eye and I had known right then and there that he was my man. It had been written all over his face. Not guilt or fear or regret, but a smug kind of pride. Not arrogance, per se, more like the expression of a cat that knew for a fact there were no canary feathers around its mouth and it had hidden the bones where no one would ever find them.

We did, though.

A search warrant served with a battering ram later and we found the remains of all five women, each in a different meat freezer in his garage. He’d been so proud of himself that he told us all of the details, about how he had been delivering to these women for months; how they had looked at him like he was a piece of meat; how he had rushed through his earlier deliveries and hurried back to their houses as his final stop of the day; how he had smiled and offered to carry the big, seemingly heavy package inside for them; how he had knocked them unconscious with a blow to the head and carried them back out to his truck in that big, formerly empty box; how he had dropped them off in his garage, locked them inside their new homes, and rushed back to work to punch out right on time. The bloody smears and claw marks on the undersides of the lids validated his story. The other things he told us he did to them upon his return are buried in the back of my mind, for those are words I choose never to relive, the expressions I never want to see again, the fates I wouldn’t have wished upon my worst enemies.

That was just over a year ago now. The case that had made me, that had helped carry Nielsen into the SAC’s office, that had brought me out here now.

This was now case number five. This was no longer a scenario where having a good looking native man—one still riding a modicum of celebrity in the press—to trot out in front of the cameras when they showed the bloody smiley faces was the main point of my continued presence. This was now officially the third murder perpetrated by the same person with the same MO. There had been a cooling-off period between the first two, followed by a period of acceleration.

I had no choice but to declare it official.

I was up against a serial killer.

He had identified me as his adversary.

And with this victim, he had declared war upon me.

A war I was no longer entirely certain I could win.

THIRTEEN

The sun was already rising by the time I reached my car. It was a good thing it had been dark when I arrived at the scene. If I’d had a better look at the maze of cacti, there’s no way on this earth I would have attempted that route, let alone at a sideways run with only my penlight to guide me. It was a miracle I wasn’t slowly bleeding to death from a million puncture wounds. A brighter man than I was would have taken one of the paths that wound around the cactus field on the way back. That brighter man would have been repeatedly struck by the thousands of diamondbacks I could hear shaking their rattles as they emerged from their dens to bask on the flat red rocks. That brighter man had probably at least figured out where the nearest emergency medical assistance could be found, though. I bumped that task to the top of my list, right below having a little chat with Chief Antone.

His words still troubled me. As did that fact that he was left-handed and in each instance the killing stroke had been delivered from behind, right to left. That in itself wasn’t proof that the killer was left-handed, but it was somewhat damning evidence. The problem was that we’d already established that the evidence couldn’t be trusted. If our unsub fancied himself the mythical trickster of lore, then nothing could be taken at face value, especially now that he’d demonstrated how meticulously every detail had been plotted.

The red desert shimmered under the red sun as it crested the red mountains behind me. The dust that rose from my tires glittered red in my rearview mirror. Even with the AC going strong, I could feel the heat starting to take hold of the world without through the window. I didn’t need to glance at my in-dash thermometer to know that the sun wasn’t even all the way up and it was already pushing a hundred degrees. Today promised to be even worse than yesterday. Between the deadly heat, the brutal landscape, and the venomous creatures, I couldn’t fathom how anyone would actually choose to live here. The thought of starting my day in a pool of sweat, shoving my feet into slippers the scorpions had claimed during the night, and stepping out onto my porch to find a rattlesnake coiled around my morning paper was about as much as I could bear. It was no wonder my father had left this miserable place at the first opportunity. You couldn’t possibly get any farther away than the Air Force could take you. And this was about the only place on the planet where they could never send you back, at least not now that the Cold War was over and the Barry M. Goldwater Bombing Range was decommissioned, leaving behind craters and bunkers and the husks of tanks and live munitions to collect dust for future generations of our vaguely hominid mutant descendants to unearth and study.

Don’t let anyone tell you I can’t be every bit as nostalgic as the next guy.

I came across the chief’s cruiser by accident. He was turning onto the main drag from the north as I was coming in from the east. I followed him all the way to the station and pulled into the gravel lot beside him. He sat in his car, staring at me through the window for several long moments with an expression I couldn’t interpret on his face. It took me a minute to realize he was waiting for the dust to settle so he didn’t get a big mouthful of grit. By the time we got out of our cars, a filthy skein had settled on my windshield that I was more than grateful not to have in my lungs. It made me wonder how much had already accumulated in there over just the last twenty-four hours. I tried not to think about the fact that people died in sandstorms not from being pelted by grains or buried under dunes, but by drowning. Technically, asphyxiation by sand. As an Air Force brat, I learned all sorts of interesting trivia that would probably never do me much good as a game show contestant. Unsurprisingly, most of it seemed to have something to do with strange and unique ways to die. I guess when you’re in the business of killing, it pays to learn a little about the craft.

Heat stroke, for example, is a nasty way to go, especially considering you remain cognizant of your ultimate fate the entire time. In a nutshell, your body sweats to lower your internal body temperature in essentially the same manner as an evaporative cooler, but that sweat costs you fluids, and there’s a finite reservoir from which to draw. Once that reservoir is exhausted, your body starts to wring it out of you at the cellular level. The blood keeps it as long as possible in an effort to maintain the flow to your brain, largely at the expense of your limbs and viscera. You stop forming urine, but continue to amass toxic byproducts your kidneys can no longer filter. You stop producing saliva, so you can no longer swallow or even wet your tongue, which begins to swell inside your mouth. You stop generating tears, so there’s nothing to cleanse the dust from your eyes or lubricate your lids enough to blink. The sun burns your eyes, causing a ghostly reddish-white cataract to form, robbing you of sight. Your lips blacken and split, letting you keep the pain, but not the blood. Consciousness comes in waves. There are the hallucinations and then there is death, either of which is vastly preferable to the searing pain that exists in between. Eventually, your body can no longer combat the external forces, allowing your core temperature to rise beyond your physical threshold. Past 102. Past 104. Past 106. Your body ceases to function. Whatever control you once held over your physical vessel fades into memory. Some people have been known to peel off their clothes, fold them neatly, and fall dead mere steps away. Others try to swim down into the ground in search of water or cooler sand and end up half-burying themselves. Still others are found with their mouths sealed shut by cactus needles from attempting to eat the pads in a misguided effort to steal the moisture they were designed to hoard. And there are some whose momentum just carries them forward until they’re dead before they hit the ground.

The distance from my car to the front door of the station was only fifteen feet, but all of those thoughts went through my head during the walk. I didn’t care if the water came out of the tap orange with rust, I was going to drink the hell out of it at the first opportunity. Maybe I could spontaneously evolve some sort of hump to contain a little extra while I was at it.

The expression on my face must have been common around these parts, because I could definitely tell Antone was enjoying a good smirk at my expense.

Deciphering that expression wasn’t a victory to write home about, but it was a small victory nonetheless.

“You look thirsty enough to drink piss,” he said. “There’s a water cooler in the back office.”

I looked squarely at him and tried to divine exactly what he meant by that, what he knew. And just like that I was back to square one.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “So we refill the container from the tap, but at least it’s cold. Do you have any idea how much it costs to get a Deep Rock delivery all the way out here?”

“Surely any driver would be thrilled to make the trip, if only for the scenery.”

I ducked into the office and filled one of the plastic cups stacked on the desk by the cooler. The others had names scribbled on them in black marker. Apparently, these weren’t designated single-use. Or maybe Louis and Olivia just really liked their cups. The tank made a blurping sound as it filled the cup. I pounded the first one and took the second back out with me.

“Looks like you enjoyed some of the scenery last night yourself.” Antone was leaning over one of the desks with his back to me, but I could hear the smile in his voice. I glanced down. My pants looked like they’d been attacked by some great quilled creature. Loose threads dangled from a hundred different puckers in the fabric and there were several small tears through which you could see the scabs on my skin.

“Let me guess...you found another one of our friend’s smiley faces, am I right?” He peered back at me with one eyebrow cocked. “I assume my phone number must have slipped your mind. It’s kind of hard to remember, what with one nine and two ones and all.”

“Your powers of observation are impressive. You must have a great mind for details.”

He stepped away from the desk, which apparently belonged to my eco-friendly, water-drinking pal Officer Louis Abispo. I guess when your entire existence is predicated upon land that’s been hotly contested for centuries, it pays to head off any potential confusion. Even the fax machine had Louis’s name on it. The curled fax Antone had just torn off the heat printer didn’t. It had a lot of blurry words and a series of photographs of the canyon wall at which I had been staring in person only a few hours ago.

“We have an arrangement with Ajo Station,” he said.

“And here I thought you’d tapped into some mystical shamanistic powers.”

I watched the anger flare in his eyes. Just a quick spark, but it was something. I figured a dig at his heritage would expose the chink in his armor. That infuriating smirk was back on his face a heartbeat later.

“Let’s take a ride,” he said. “There’s something I want to show you.”